Phone access setup

Access nixx from your phone (or laptop) via SSH over Tailscale. Full TUI support.

How it works

Phone (Termius) → Tailscale VPN → SSH (port 4444) → pyrite → nixx chat

Tailscale creates a WireGuard-based mesh VPN between your devices. Traffic is peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted. Tailscale's coordination servers handle key exchange and NAT traversal but never see your data.

Prerequisites

• Tailscale account (free tier is fine)
• Tailscale installed on pyrite: curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
• Tailscale app on phone (Play Store / App Store)
• SSH client on phone

Phone setup

1. Install Tailscale from the Play Store and log in
2. Install Termius (connection manager) and Termux (terminal) from the Play Store
3. Generate an SSH key in Termux: ssh-keygen -t ed25519
4. Copy the key to pyrite (requires temporarily enabling password auth):

   # On pyrite: enable password auth
   sudo sed -i 's/^PasswordAuthentication no/PasswordAuthentication yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   sudo systemctl restart ssh
   
   # On phone (Termux): copy the key
   ssh-copy-id -p 4444 siderealyear@100.80.177.16
   
   # On pyrite: disable password auth
   sudo sed -i 's/^PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   sudo systemctl restart ssh
   

5. In Termius, create a connection: host 100.80.177.16, port 4444, user siderealyear, select the key generated in step 3

Usage

From Termius, connect to pyrite and run:

nixx chat

All slash commands work: /sources, /lookup, /source, /context.

Troubleshooting

• Connection refused: Check SSH is running (systemctl status ssh) and you have the right port (4444)
• Permission denied: Key not copied correctly. Re-run ssh-copy-id from Termux
• nixx: command not found: Install via pipx: pipx install --editable ~/nixx
• "All connection attempts failed": nixx server is not running. sudo systemctl start nixx-server